David — more equipment for you to carry in that great new bag of yours — lucky it’s so commodious — but we’re an aging audience and have trouble hearing — please! — have one of your staff experts find a great little shotgun mike for an iPhone, certainly they’re out there. of course, in a quiet room, this wouldn’t have been so indecipherable. we’re hoping you’ll post more of these.

That’s a limitation of the iPhone camera that hadn’t occurred to me. People would laugh at you if you threaten to use it as a weapon, unlike a pro DSLR with a telephoto zoom which could double as something a crazy killer in a Cormac McCarthy novel might use to murder people, or knock out livestock. I suppose it could work as some kind of throwing weapon though. If someone slashes and grabs your camera bag, you could through the iPhone at the back of their head as they run away, kind of like Batman,thereby knocking them out. Maybe someday they’ll make a camera phone in the shape of a boomerang for just such an occasion, though personally, I’d prefer a frisbee phone camera.

Laura had just undergone throat surgery (she is ok) and her voice is soft in the first place…yes, i need a mike hookup….

IMAGECONSCIOUS

whenever i teach a workshop (5-10 days long) or am in a heavy shooting scenario, i drop off of Burn and most social media stuff….also my location changes…i was in Rio and now Dubai..the scene is different …i am a voracious shooter by nature, so stay tuned…i am sure my Instagrams etc will bounce back depending on my work load and my location….

I share your pain with recording audio. Although it should be, it’s not an natural fit with photography sometimes. However, this time there’s a close parallel: If your sound isn’t good enough, your microphone isn’t close enough.

Here’s a couple of tips. If the two of you have smartphones and one of them is the video recorder, set the other one to audio recorder mode and put the microphone end facing the interviewer and interviewee, turning the microphone more toward the quieter of the two talkers. Then, as you start the recording clap once to camera for sync. Just remember to share the better audio file!

I’ve taken this a couple of stages further and have my old iPod Touch with a Rode SmartLav microphone, have another on my iPhone, and record ‘wild track’ audio along with the video on my iPad. I just wire up the interviewer and myself up with the two lav microphones and lay the recordings from the iPod and iPhone over the wild track in ‘post’

If there’s just the one phone and it’s also your recorder, buy an iRig Mic (which fits into the telephone socket) and do the interviewer thing.